George Weinstein's Blog, page 4

Judging Books by Their Covers and Titles

Readers’ affection for the evocative Hardscrabble Road cover photo (above at left, with the three boys on Spring Creek near Colquitt, GA) has helped to sell copies of that book for ten years and counting. This image also inspired at least one reader to paint it; she honored me with a copy that hangs in a place of honor in my home. The cover photo is one of several gifted to me by my first wife’s father, the actual Roger/”Bud” whose childhood I fictionalized for that historical novel. The photo at right, of him and his two old brothers as teenagers, was another such gift and is the centerpiece of the Return to Hardscrabble Road cover.

In the latter photo, I love how the arms of the older boys (Jay and Chet in the books) are entwined while the youngest (Roger in the books) is merely leaning against his middle brother. I think it captures both the loving relationship among the boys and also the perpetual conflict that my protagonist feels: being one of the trio but always slightly apart. In Return to Hardscrabble Road, the bonds between siblings (including their older sister) will be tested more than ever.

We are cautioned as children, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” This is usually said when an adult is either warning a child not to be taken in by someone who seems charming on the outside but is harboring bad intent or encouraging a child to give a gruff or otherwise scary person a chance to demonstrate the goodness in their heart. I remember an instance when I heard it twice at one family get-together—from the same parent—where one meaning was intended and then the other, about two different relatives. Perhaps growing up with such craziness turned me into a writer. The saying probably never applied to actual books because any of us who is sighted makes an initial judgment whenever we glimpse a cover. It might be a visceral love/hate response, a feeling of intrigue or confusion at what we’re seeing, a shrugging “meh,” or whatever, but we do have an immediate reaction.

Using photographs for a book cover is tricky. Displaying a black-and-white image to convey the “back in the day” nature of a story has been a device for so long, it’s almost a cliché at this point. But not just any photo will do because many pictures don’t tell a story. Nothing is happening in such photos and often no feelings are being exhibited—the shots just look old.

Regardless of whether the cover makes use of a photo or an illustration, the subjectivity of every decision the publisher/author must make can be paralyzing (and many publishers overrule their authors’ preferences). This applies to everything from colors and fonts to faces. Faces, for example, can be engaging or a turnoff, depending on the viewer, so it’s chancy to show them. This is the reason so many characters depicted on book covers have their backs to the viewers: the publisher/author wants the viewer to project their idea of an engaging face rather than risk showing one that won’t grab readers’ attention.

I was lucky to have been given the image of the three boys on the creek because it’s a classic image that looks like something out of Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer and tells a story of poverty, ruggedness, and rural life. The black and white graininess suggests the Great Depression, which is when the actual photo was taken. Though the photo of the boys as teenagers may not be as timeless, I do hope it conveys the closeness of the brothers, even if readers don’t immediately notice the difference between the other two brothers’ affection and Roger’s slight apartness.

Titles can also be problematic. The titles of the books we love often last in our memory long after we forget the authors’ name, but how to pick a good one? Short and punchy or long and lyrical? As with covers, publishers often reject the authors’ choice and request another one or select something their marketing department prefers. Whichever way the publisher/author goes, what they settle on must be memorable while also being uncommon or, even better, unique—but not off-putting. They need to do a search on Amazon to see if others have already used the title they have in mind. If other titles are identical or at least similar, they must decide whether their book is at least in a different genre or is in another way distinctive.

I had to change the title of my kidnap thriller from The Color of Lies a couple months before publication after discovering a just-published novel of that title featuring a protagonist with chromesthesia, same as mine. Someone had beaten me to the punch, so I had to come up with Watch What You Say. In hindsight, I think it works even better, especially when paired with the colorful eye on the cover, hinting at Bo Riccardi’s chromesthetic ability: an image that tells a story.

Hardscrabble Road has a few titular competitors, but it’s distinctive enough to stand out—and it works well as a metaphor for Roger’s journey through childhood. My other historical novel, The Five Destinies of Carlos Moreno, is on the “long and lyrical” end of the spectrum. But is it memorable? Not according to its sales, but it is unique. On the other hand, my domestic drama The Caretaker and my mystery novel Aftermath are short and punchy—easy to remember—but utterly commonplace and tough to find if someone recommends either book to a friend but can’t recall my name. For example, dozens of books have “aftermath” in their title, including a Star Wars novel, which will always show up at the top of search lists.

All these obstacles can be overcome, though. Aftermath is second only to Hardscrabble Road in number of books sold among my titles, so people are managing to find that mystery, though thank goodness the Star Wars books aren’t whodunits. My titles tend to tell stories, which is why Return to Hardscrabble Road is so named: it sounds like the sequel it is. At every book signing I do, buyers compliment the cover art of all my novels, so kudos continue to go to SFK Press and Indigo collaborative designer Olivia Hammerman for making my books eye-catching.

I hope, dear readers, that this primer has given you an appreciation for some of the decisions and subtleties that go into the book covers and titles you see in your favorite bookstore and online. It’s impossible not to judge, I know, but spare a thought for the book equivalent of the scary-looking relative with goodness in their heart.

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What to Do before Publishing, Part 1

“How do you know when it’s time to stop writing and start the publishing process?” I receive this question almost monthly from writers. There’s no single correct answer. If you have a deadline imposed by your publisher, you know when you’re supposed to turn in your manuscript—the decision has been made for you. If your publisher isn’t holding you to a schedule or if you self-publish and call all the shots, then there’s no contractual deadline that drives you. Instead, there might be a practical deadline: if you want to get your book out by October/November so you can take advantage of pre-holiday sales (which are almost always brisker than any other time of year, at least for most authors), you can work backward from your desired publication date to determine when it needs to go into the printer’s queue.

If you aren’t focused on making bank on Black Friday and the shopping-palooza of December, or if you’re currently seeking a publisher or agent representation, then when you decide to stop writing is determined by a feeling more than anything else. For me, it’s the moment when I realize I’m no longer improving my manuscript with edits. Instead, I’m making changes for their own sake—just to be doing something with the sentences—rather than creating a more satisfying experience for readers.

I once worked for a high-tech telecommunications company as a project manager. One of the higher-ups had a terrible expression when the engineers would continue to tweak their designs even though the system performance met the customers’ specs and marked improvements weren’t being made: “It’s time to shoot the engineers and go to production.” An awful image to be sure, but he understood that the creatives in this scenario could spend the rest of their careers fiddling with their circuit boards without making something substantively better than what they already had. When I catch myself doing likewise, it’s time to give the writer a rest and move on to publication, or when I was starting out, it was time to move on to querying agents and publishers.

Pre-Publication Book Details

How best to use that time between post-writing and publication? There are numerous activities, some of which every writer must do, traditionally published and self-published alike, and others that are usually out of the hands of traditionally published authors but that self-published authors must do or hire others to do. These include cover design, front matter, back matter, and editing. Marketing is a wholly separate beast and will be the subject of Part 2. In this post, I’m going to focus on the creation of the book itself: the final product with its many elements.

The cover design consists of the following:

Artwork/fonts/colors/layout on the front and back covers and spineBack-cover copy/teaserPlacement of blurb excerpts (compliments from hopefully well- or at least better-known authors whose kind words could convince readers to take a chance on buying your book)Publisher’s/Self-Publisher’s logoISBN block with barcode and price

Cover Art

If you’re self-publishing, you’ll be either creating all these details yourself or hiring one or more people to do this work for you. Either way, hopefully you’ve already started this process, as it can be especially time-consuming if you must queue up for a cover artist’s attention. Cover art is hugely important—we all judge a book by its cover as well as its title. Grabbing some nebulous clip art and slapping it on the cover with a bland font is a death sentence for your book. It pays to invest in a talented artist’s work if you don’t have those skills.

If you have a traditional publisher, you might complete a form suggesting some cover ideas and/or supply possible images to them for purchase or inspiration. In either case, listen to the opinions of professional cover designers. If they tell you the graphic you have in mind simply won’t work on an 8.25 inch x 5.25 inch book cover—let alone as the thumbnail size we’re used to seeing online—believe them and use that beloved picture instead on your website.

Blurbs

Big publishers might get some of their famous authors to supply blurbs for a book they’ve anointed as next season’s breakout hit, but most authors need to secure their own blurbs. Many self-published authors skip this step, which I think is a missed opportunity. I’ve sold any number of books because seeing Terry Kay, Joshilyn Jackson, or some other well-known author’s endorsement on the front or back cover convinced a reader who was on the fence to take a chance buying my work. Are blurbs hard to get? Yes. Are they worth the effort? I really think they are. Seeking endorsements also provides very good practice asking for something from other people, which authors need to get comfortable with if they ever hope to successfully hand-sell their work in bookstores or via social media posts. You develop a thick skin, become accustomed to being ignored or rebuffed, and cultivate a deep sense of gratitude that hopefully you’ll pay forward when some other author asks you for a blurb.

Back Cover Copy/Teaser

My publisher allows me to write the back-cover teaser for my books, but many authors I know submit a summary describing the main characters, primary plot, and the stakes involved (e.g., finding true love, life and death, fate of the world, good triumphing over evil) and someone in marketing or another department writes this copy. This is a sales pitch more than a summary, designed to intrigue a reader and make them want to know more. At my book signings, soon-to-be customers get snagged by the cover and the title, then they turn the book over and read the copy and any blurbs there. If they start randomly flipping through the pages, I know they’re going to buy—they’re just talking themselves into it. But the process starts with the front cover and then the back cover closes the deal (along with, if necessary, my streamlined patter about the book that provides additional selling points—i.e., award-winning, book club favorite, if you like X, you’ll like this, etc.).

Front matter is everything inside the book that appears before the first chapter or prologue:

Longer blurbsHalf-title page: only the book title, without the author’s or publisher’s nameFrontispiece: usually a list other books by the author available from that publisher or artwork on the left page opposite the full title pageFull title page, which includes what the half-title page lacksCopyright pageAbout the author and acknowledgments (both sometimes included as end matter instead)DedicationAnd perhaps some items usually found in nonfiction rather than novels, including the table of contents, a foreword written by someone other than the author to provide credibility, and a preface or an introduction written by the author

These are a lot of pages leading up to the main body of the book (unimaginatively called “body matter”).

End/Back matter in nonfiction consists of a glossary, bibliography, and index. Some sci-fi/fantasy tomes include glossaries, too, and some fiction publishers put the about-the-author section and acknowledgments at the end, possibly along with an ad for other books by that author or other authors in the same genre.

Rewriting and Editing

One pre-publication activity common to nearly every writer is rewriting and editing based on an independent editor’s or critique group’s (or editing program) feedback. If you don’t have reliable critique partners, it’s worth the cost to have a professional point out things that don’t work, are grammatically wrong, or simply don’t make sense. One point of rewriting and editing is to remove all the speedbumps that could slow down or sidetrack a reader or otherwise spoil the immersive reading experience. Nothing kicks you out of a story faster than missing words, glaring typos, or contradictory details—all of which are hard to detect by the author because they know what the text is supposed to convey instead of what is actually in print. Another reason to rewrite and edit is to add details that submerge the reader deeper in the story and the point-of-view character’s mind. Seek to end every chapter on some kind of cliffhanger—physical or emotional. If your book fails to leave something at stake at each chapter’s end, the reader has a reason to put your book down and might never pick it up again. Don’t let them off the hook!

But when you find yourself moving words around or changing punctuation just to keep making changes, you know it’s time to send the writer to another project (no need to shoot anyone) and go to production with the current project. Hopefully this little guide tells you what to do then with the book itself. In Part 2, I’ll tackle pre-publication marketing.

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Staggering toward Readers through the Pre-Publication Twilight

My wife, author Kim Conrey, and I are in the pre-publication twilight period, making the final tweaks to our books before the text is set in proverbial stone by our respective publishers for the first printing. The writing is done but seeking reviews and reviewing the text now consume our attention, and we’re keenly aware time is running out. During this period, the term “deadline” becomes more ominous, with our reputations, if not our artistic lives, on the line.

I’m in the midst of chasing blurbs for my historical novel Return to Hardscrabble Road. Blurbs are those compliments you see on the book cover and the first inside pages from recognizable authors, which assure potential buyers that they’ll be spending wisely if they purchase the book. One benefit of being a longtime writer and active in the literary community is that I am friends with numerous other authors, all of whom are better known than me, have garnered sterling reviews and/or won notable awards, and sometimes can be found on the New York Times bestseller list. The flip side is that these are very busy people working on their own books, so it takes some hustle and chutzpah to secure their endorsement.

Kim has already received her blurbs. Her current task is the review of each chapter in her sci-fi romance Stealing Ares, Book One in the Ares Ascending Series. She is confirming every piece of punctuation is correct, any extraneous words are removed, and every sentence, paragraph, and chapter provides an excellent reading experience. In mid-July, my publisher will ask me to do the same for the book I think of as Scrabble Harder.

Word of mouth is still the way a book goes from languishing in obscurity to becoming a hit. Thus, this pre-publication period is a stressful time because we’re aware that any errors we overlook—and any new mistakes we inadvertently introduce—will be noted by every reader considering what kind of online review to leave and whether to recommend our novel to friends/family/book clubs. We imagine eagle-eyed readers snorting and muttering in disgust, “Idiot, that verb should be subjunctive, and you wouldn’t know how to use a semicolon correctly if your life depended on it.”

Don’t publishers edit, to guarantee their books are perfect? Publishers might task their overworked employees with this—or outsource that job to busy contractors—and impose tight deadlines in either case. These people are as apt to miss typos and other problems as anyone else. Or the publishers rely on programs such as Grammarly or ProWritingAid, which are notorious for taking perfectly acceptable terms and turning them into gibberish or hilarious malaprops, just like the autocorrect on your phone. Thus, the ultimate responsibility lies with the author—and it can bring us to tears.

While making a 90,000-word manuscript flawless is a nearly impossible undertaking, it’s easier to ensure that the characters are engaging, the stakes remain high throughout the story, and the plot keeps the reader turning the pages. Even at this late stage, Kim is discovering ways to insert cliffhangers at the end of chapters so there will be even more reasons not to set down her book. We authors feel perverse satisfaction when readers tell us they have lost sleep and sometimes forgotten to eat and do other necessaries because they were so wrapped up in our stories. Sometimes, that magic happens right at the very end, just before we turn the book over to the publisher for the last time. It’s almost never too late to make a good tale even better. We’ll be improving our books for you right up until the publishers pry them from our fingers.

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How Writers Can Use the Five Senses with Settings

I traveled to Colquitt in Southwest Georgia a few times recently to visit a fan of Hardscrabble Road whose father was friends with the real-life inspiration for Roger “Bud” MacLeod. He has become a good friend and a gracious host on these trips. The other reason was to reconnect with the setting of that book and its forthcoming sequel, Return to Hardscrabble Road (coming out on October 11), so I could make sure I included key sensory details in the final draft.

The brilliant author and teacher Steven James tells us that setting serves numerous purposes in our stories:

1. Above all, the physicality of the location must be clear, so the reader will not only envision it but feel it as you intended.

2. The time period of the setting must be apparent as well, avoiding anachronisms in historical fiction but also ensuring that, in a contemporary story, the influences of modern life are apparent, too.

3. Setting must also reinforce the emotions and mood you want to evoke in your story through description and by affecting the characters’ experiences.

4. Ideally, the setting is so important that the significant actions in the story could not have occurred in the same way anywhere else in the world.

5. The locale either assists the protagonist or interferes with their pursuits, depending on the tone you want to convey.

6. Overall, the setting should reflect the goals for your story in terms of its meaning and purpose—what your point was in writing it.

Even if I can’t always convey the more ephemeral qualities Steven achieves in his work, I do like to make the setting visceral, especially when the location is outside of the cities and suburbs in which most of us live. I don’t need to tell you what walking on concrete is like or describe all the sensations of driving a car. In Return to Hardscrabble Road, though, I do need to describe the big sky—during the day and at night—and how the sandy loam of the topsoil crumbles and compacts underfoot like you’re walking on pie crust.

In addition to the images and feel of the setting, the smells, sounds, and even flavors can put and hold your readers in a scene and touch them at an emotional level. I think that’s the key to getting people to connect with your work. If your words can evoke your intended feelings in them, they’ll become fans even partway through your story and, by the end of it, evangelists who will make it their mission to tell everyone that they need to experience your writing, too. Because when your setting and your other story elements reach someone at the emotional level, people won’t just passively read your work—they’ll live it. And you’ll have fans for life, and new friends, too, if you’re lucky—much like I am.

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Reconnecting with a Setting—and with the Past

In recent months, I’ve journeyed twice to Colquitt, GA to reconnect with the people and setting of my original Hardscrabble Road novel and the sequel, the unoriginally titled Return to Hardscrabble Road (working name: Scrabble Harder), which will be published on October 11.

These visits reinforced the kindness and decency I’ve always found in the folks who live there. My host for these trips was the son of a man who was friends with the real-life inspiration for Roger “Bud” MacLeod, which made my time there especially wonderful. With his help, I was reminded about the notable landscape of Southwest Georgia.

Some who reside in the northern part of the state believe that all of Georgia is hilly and tree-covered, with red clay underfoot. In fact, I remember speaking at a book club where the hostess apologized for one member’s absence; that individual had complained that she couldn’t bring herself to read past the first page of Hardscrabble Road, where I described the sandy dirt—she insisted that Georgia soil was slab-like and as red as Mars. That’s true in some parts of our fair state, but not once you get down to Colquitt. In fact, driving south on US Hwy. 27, you can actually see where the landscape transitions from red dirt to the sandy loam I described.

Southwest Georgia also has a very flat topography, with pines, oaks, and other trees at the horizons, huge expanses of grasses and that gritty soil, and the vast blue bowl of sky that could make you think you’re out west. At night, with no light pollution to mar the view, you’re treated to a million more stars than you can see while peering overhead anywhere in metro Atlanta.

In this location, back in the 1930s and ’40s, the actual people who inspired the Hardscrabble Road novels toiled and lived and laughed and loved and cried—and, in some cases, died. The Great Depression and World War II era were hard on folks everywhere, but these were among the poorest people, often growing up without prospects unless they could escape into the military or marry up the economic ladder. In Return to Hardscrabble Road, Roger MacLeod, having done the former in the first book, is now afraid of getting thrust back into that punishing life. Standing in those fields much like the ones he plowed and feeling the unrelenting sun as a blazing weight on my scalp and shoulders, I could readily conjure those fears.

But it was also easy to relay the steely determination and rugged humor of the people who call Colquitt home. One of the ways in which Return to Hardscrabble Road is easier to read and was more joyful to write than the first book is that it’s somewhat funnier. I worked hard to capture the wry spirit of the people I know who once lived there or do today. Admittedly, some of this is gallows humor, because there are any number of harrowing situations in which Roger and his family find themselves in the sequel, but I think you’ll laugh out loud more than you did while reading the first book.

Those trips to Colquitt brought back everything that’s special about the place and the people who call it home. I look forward to many more visits to that unique corner of Georgia and to spend time with the good folks who welcome me as if I were returning home myself.

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